Inevitably, social media enters the realm of grief

Sunday

Mar 30, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 30, 2014 at 9:42 AM

In 2010, when Rebecca Soffer's father died of a heart attack on a cruise to the Bahamas, the condolence notes came pouring in, many in the form of text messages. "I got so many from very good friends," Soffer, 37, said from the couch of her New York apartment not long ago. "They said they were 'sorry' or 'how r u?' "

In 2010, when Rebecca Soffer’s father died of a heart attack on a cruise to the Bahamas, the condolence notes came pouring in, many in the form of text messages. “I got so many from very good friends,” Soffer, 37, said from the couch of her New York apartment not long ago. “They said they were ‘sorry’ or ‘how r u?’ ”

Text message was also the preferred medium of a 20-something who asked a funeral home in Los Angeles to text him a picture of his mother’s corpse to help him avoid having to identify the body in person.

Caitlin Doughty, 29, the director of the funeral home at the time, initially thought, “No, I’m not going to send you a text of your mother’s corpse, but as someone who believes in interacting with the reality of death as intentionally as possible, I thought a text was better than nothing."

Doughty is an undertaker and the founder of the Order of the Good Death, a website about mortality. The funeral home, which had never before received such a request, asked the son to sign a form saying he understood the emotional distress that might result from the photo before sending it.

The social norms for loss and the Internet are clearly still evolving. But Gen Y-ers and millennials have begun projecting their own sensibilities onto rituals and discussions surrounding death. As befits the first generation of digital natives, they are starting blogs, YouTube series and Instagram feeds about grief, loss and even the macabre, bringing the conversation about bereavement and the deceased into a public forum, sometimes with jarring results.

In November, to give the topic a generationally specific space, Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner, 34, started Modern Loss, a website geared to people around their age to address many permutations of loss, from miscarriages to a parent’s death. Both women have confronted the latter: Four years before Soffer’s father’s heart attack, her mother was killed in a car accident. And in 2004, Birkner’s father and stepmother were murdered at their home in Sedona, Ariz., by a drug addict.

Soffer and Birkner found the emotional and psychological support resources for people in their early adult life-stage lacking. “I went to a family-of-homicide-victims support group run through Safe Horizons in a church basement in Harlem when I was living on the Upper West Side, and there was no one in my generation,” said Birkner, a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. “Still, it did save my life.”

Soffer said she was the only person younger than 65 at the grief support groups she joined, adding that among those her own age, “I barely know anyone who had lost both their parents.”

For a generation known for broadcasting internal monologue across the Internet, some of its members seem eager for spaces to express not just the good stuff that litters everyone’s Facebook newsfeed, but also the painful.

In November, Melissa Lafsky Wall, 35, founder of New York-based Brick Wall Media, turned to Modern Loss after a miscarriage, posting an essay called “The Silent Sorrow.”

“The Internet should speak to the parts of life that we all experience, but aren’t represented in most media, a large one being grief and loss,” Wall said, adding that the feedback she got was all positive, which she attributes to the site. “If you are going to write about your miscarriage on Reddit, for instance, it’s going to be a very different community.”

Then there’s the lingua franca of social media — the “like” button — that’s totally discordant with death.

“My God, is there anything creepier than a post announcing someone lost a loved one and seeing ‘ 136 people like this’ underneath?” Soffer said.

Facebook floated the idea of a “sympathize button,” something that came out of its annual hackathon, but has no plans to pursue it, according to the company. (Facebook does offer an option to memorialize an account that prevents anyone from logging into it in the future, but allows friends and family to leave posts on the timeline.)

The fact that the Internet is perhaps not the best channel for grief is why David Fajgenbaum, 28, the founder of Actively Moving Forward with Grief, a support network for college students with sick or deceased parents, said his organization of 40 chapters on campuses has been cautious about integrating an online component.

“Someone could say the wrong thing online and could really hurt someone,” said Fajgenbaum, who started the support group in his mother’s memory.

Miss Manners, a.k.a. Judith Martin, writes rather unequivocally on the matter. “Letters of condolence should be written by hand,” she said. “Burdensome as it may be, it offers the comfort of knowing that one is representing the deceased to those who cared about him.”

But as Fajgenbaum acknowledged, young people are eager for that virtual connection; after all, technology and the Internet are a ubiquitous part of their existence. That’s what Jason Feifer, 33, creator of the instantly viral Tumblr “Selfies at Funerals,” discovered when he posted a few dozen photos of teenagers taking pictures of themselves at funerals. In doing so, Feifer, an editor at Fast Company magazine, said he was documenting a newfangled mourning practice. “It’s important for the older generation to see more than disrespect and to see some kind of genuine communication,” he said.

Admittedly, though, some of the images made him cringe, in particular the young woman who wrote: “Love my hair today. Hate why I’m dressed up #funeral.”

Feifer said, “I think there are a lot of kids who saw this Tumblr and will not take a selfie at a funeral, but it doesn’t mean that the kids who did take these photos don’t know how to grieve."

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